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You can't buy a hybrid cloud as a product nor as a service, and even if you could you would need to customise it for your unique requirements and constraints. The reality today is you need to buy the ingredients from a supplier then roll your own hybrid cloud and to manage this you need to put in place a Hybrid Cloud Manifesto.

The SPC-2 benchmark is a useful benchmark for bandwidth intensive sequential workloads, such as backup, ETL (extraction, translate, load) and large-scale analytics. Wikibon does a deep comparative analysis of the SPC-2 results, time-adjusting the pricing information to correct for different publication dates. Wikibon then analyses performance and price-performance together, and develops a guide to enable practitioners to understand the business options and best strategic fit. Wikibon concludes the Oracle ZS4-4 storage appliance dominates this high-bandwidth processing as of the best combination of good performance and great price performance at the high-end and mid-range of this market.

The thesis of the overall Wikibon research in this area is that within 2 years, the majority of IT installations will be moving to combine workloads together to share data using NAND flash as the only active storage media. This will save on IT budget and improve IT productivity, especially in the IT development function. Our research shows that these changes have the potential to reduce the typical IT budget by 34% over a five year period while delivering the same functionality to the business. The projected IT savings of moving to a shared-data all-flash datacenter for an organization with a $40M IT budget are $38M over 5 years, with an IRR of 246%, an annual ROI of 542%, and a breakeven of 13 months. Future research will look at the potential to maximize the contribution of IT to the business, and will conclude that IT budgets should increase to deliver historic improvements in internal productivity and increased business potential.

The Public Cloud market is still forming – but seems to be poised to soon enter the Early Majority stage of its development where user behavior, preferences, and strategies become more stable. Large enterprises are more discerning of Public Cloud IaaS offerings. Test and development appears to be a key entry point for them since scale, operational complexity, and security/compliance/regulatory demands require a more nuanced approach to Public Cloud for IaaS. Small and Medium enterprises have the greatest need for Public Cloud and should consider well-established, lower risk entry points to Public Cloud like SaaS, Email, and Web Applications before venturing into Mission Critical and IaaS workloads to help them navigate an increasingly complex and costly IT infrastructure environment.

Opscode hired Mitch Hill, formerly of Accenture, and most recently served as CEO of Avanade, a technology services joint venture between Accenture and Microsoft.

Zenoss Founder and CEO Bill Karpovitch is a pioneer in the realm of cloud computing. Earlier in his career, he spent five years as an Accenture executive where he led architecture and development of large-scale OSS/BSS applications for global telecommunications providers.

Dave Rich said in his time at Accenture he often encountered CEOs of startups who were either technically brilliant or super enthusiastic sales people. The technically brilliant people can demonstrate how their technology is superior but that is just an aspect of what is required to sell into the enterprise. The CEO with a sales pedigree may be overly optimistic, which leads to its own set of issues.

In his role, Rich said he acts as foil. There has to be the right balance between entrepreneurialism and managing the business. Venture capitalists really need that expertise as it’s all about managing the burn. He said that’s something you learn at Accenture.

Accenture executives play the role of advocate for both innovation and what’s right for the customer. They know that balance and can bring that understanding into the startup.

“In many ways we have been running startups inside businesses,” Rich said.

Don Rippert retired as Accenture’s CTO on June 3o after 30 years working at the company. On July 1, he started work as CEO at Basho.

“I was working with a lot of small, innovative companies that wanted to be incdued in Accenture solutions that Accenture would sell,” Rippert said in an interview this week. “I would identify them. I got to know quite a few. I got to know the startups and the people. I learned one of the biggest hurdles for startups is thinking through how to sell to large enterprises.”

It’s the message that matters, Rippert said. Accenture executives are trained to help customers think through solutions.

“You are accustomed to saying ‘this will save you this much – this will generate this additonal revenue,’ ” Rippert said.

It is an adjustment for the startup when an Acccenture executive joins its ranks. Basho employees expressed some reservations about hiring an Accenture executive. But they accepted him. They essentially wanted to see if he had the chops to be their CEO. He said he was able to do that by proving to them he understood the technology.

It also helps that Rippert is steadfast about keeping the company’s hacker culture intact.

“There was a bit of a concern that there would be people with suits and ties coming in, that’s the last thing i need,” he said.

Basho has a particular focus on the DevOps culture and how it is emerging. DevOps looks at the ways developers and operations people work together to deploy and manage apps. It’s a cultural mix in some ways similar to the new services focus that Accenture executives bring to technology companies.

Opscode Founder Jesse Robbins and CEO Mitch Hill

Opscode’s story is in many ways what Rich and Rippert describe. The companies needed a CEO who could take the company to the next level. And the founder, in this case, Jesse Robbins, now acts as the chief community manager for the company, overseeing Opscode and Chef, the open-source community driven recipes that provide IT with ways to automate and provide integration framework built specifically for automating the cloud. Robbins now gets to do what he does best with a Mitch Hill, a CEO who has a proven track record.

And Zenoss? CEO Bill Karpovich received the Ernst & Young Entrepreneur Of The Year 2011 Maryland Award in the Emerging company category. He has been featured on the cover of InformationWeek and has led the companty from startup to category leader in the IT management software market.

Not bad, huh?

About Alex Williams

Alex Williams is an editor for SiliconAngle and lives a charmed life in Portland, Or.